


A Bagel To The Brain

by whaleofatime



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: And the family help him through it, Bruce Wayne gets hit with the toxin, Gen, Hallucinations and Fever Dreams, Hurt/Comfort, Scarecrow's Fear Toxin (DCU), Symbolism of doughnut holes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-12
Updated: 2020-04-12
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:33:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23613829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whaleofatime/pseuds/whaleofatime
Summary: Moments before the monthly family brunch, Bruce Wayne gets taken down and out by some fear toxin baked into bread. Alfred and all four prodigal sons work to pull him out of his hallucination, even as they heavily feature in Bruce's worst nightmare.It comes down to a choice, and the realisation that brunch might actually be cursed.
Relationships: Bruce Wayne & Damian Wayne, Dick Grayson & Bruce Wayne, Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne, Tim Drake & Bruce Wayne
Comments: 31
Kudos: 160





	A Bagel To The Brain

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kuro49](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuro49/gifts).



You have to give it to the villains of Gotham; maybe old dogs can’t learn new tricks in other cities, but the drab grey skies and the perpetual hint of _eau de urine_ on concrete inspires so, _so_ much creativity in the local criminals. If Bruce hadn’t decided to dedicate himself to a lifetime of pursuing justice, he might even admire the absolute _audacity_ of Scarecrow going wild with his latest fear toxin in an industrial kitchen that supplies thousands of bakeries and homes city-wide with bagels and bread, crippling Gotham right in her belly.

That realisation comes much, much later.

Bruce biting into his pre-brunch breakfast sandwich of cured salmon and microgreens on fresh bread has a much quicker turnaround time.

It’s almost noon. Billionaire, Batman, actual adult man Bruce Wayne bites into a bagel and passes out straight into a bowl of soup.

-

He’s stood in front of a mansion that pales in comparison to the Manor, and he’s in a tuxedo that is far, far too shiny to be in good taste. There’s a camera crew facing him, a red carpet between them like an untouchable border, and there’s something….fuzzy about everything. Bruce hasn’t had a legitimate, honest-to-God hangover since his twenties, but this does remind him of the time he mixed marijuana with a touch too much home-brewed pineapple rum out in Absolutely Nowhere, Belize.

He’s sweating, which is odd. His face and neck is all damp, but given the amount of physical fitness that is required to put a dent in Gotham’s crime rate while dressed as a bat, standing around in a bad suit shouldn’t have him this sweaty all over. 

He doesn’t even have a pocket square to dab his face with. Trying to, to _remember_ why he’s here and dressed like this yields no memory, and given the presence of cameras Bruce snaps into his flighty socialite personality, smiling vapidly about two feet above the centre of the huddled cameramen. 

Was he kidnapped? Drugged on the way here? Where is _here_ , anyways? He shifts slightly, this way and that, and very calmly does not groan when he finds _none_ of the stuff he usually keeps on him: no batarangs made of starch that have a vicious edge but dissolve in the wash, no tiny smoke bombs masquerading as cufflinks, no ring that doubles as an emergency signal. He’s dressed in three layers of questionable polyester, and he might as well be naked.

Hyper-aware even when ( _especially when_ ) drifting through his thoughts, Bruce turns with fantastic slowness to observe a limousine driving up to the other end of the red carpet. He doesn’t _feel_ like he’s in danger, even if his heart rate’s strangely uneven and his face feels warm and wet and he can’t remember a single blessed thing about the past, oh, 24 hours or so, so he keeps on a look of handsome idiocy and figures that so long as he isn’t about to face armed attackers, he’s probably still in control of the situation. 

The car draws to a halt, and Alfred is there, somehow, suddenly, to pull open the door.

The relief that shoots through Bruce is the taste of morphine right after 5 broken bones. No matter what else is wrong, if Alfred is here, it’s going to be okay. He’s more than happy to just ignore all the strangeness that’s going on and head straight for the man, but he finds that he’s…. frozen in place, somehow.

Oh, god. It’s drugs, it must be drugs, it’s definitely drugs, and he’s not even wearing the cleverly rigged Rolex with its 4 polyvalent antivenoms embedded into the watch face.

It’s fine. Bruce doesn’t need proximity, doesn’t even need _words_ to communicate with Alfred. All he needs is for the man to turn and look at him, just the barest glance and the distress in Bruce’s mask of a face is going to be broadcasted to him at an alarming volume, and it’s going to be fine.

Alfred doesn’t turn, and the feeling of _wrongness_ informs Bruce, quite smugly, that Alfred will not turn to him, oh, he won’t turn for Bruce.

-

“Master Bruce! If this is the result of ignoring my warnings about how humans do need to sleep to survive, I will be most cross.”

Alfred knows, of course, that even when passing out in exhaustion Bruce would be far too conscientious to slam face-first into soup, would instead be slumped against the chair, safe and away from China, snoring like a truck in dire disrepair.

Alfred saves him from his meal, and slaps him hard, twice, across both cheeks.

There’s no response, and Alfred takes a deep, calming breath before he murmurs “What absolute bollocks,” extremely aggressively under his breath. Bruce is deadweight, and he’s a lot of deadweight at that, and no amount of top-notch healthcare can ease out the grinding in Alfred’s knees and a sticky shoulder when he keeps regularly needing to haul heroes up and down the house.

What an impossible, unbearable burden.

-

The door opens; a handsome man steps out of a limousine, and it’s Dick. It’s clearly Dick, from the glossy flop of his hair to the unbearable sweetness in the curve of his smile, wearing an equally tacky dark blue suit. He doesn’t say anything to Alfred, just smiles blandly, and isn’t that yet another alarm on top of the wailing cacophony nearly drowning out any semblance of reasonable thought in Bruce’s head. Something’s wrong, clearly. Is _everyone_ drugged? Is this a time-slip, and he’s blacked out through 6 months of tremendous personal turmoil? Is this a parallel universe, where they don’t know each other and somehow also happen to be featuring in a reality show?

His first instinct is to bundle Dick and Alfred into the car and just drive off. For all that Bruce knows he can take pride in his ability to strategise and plan and reason, people often miss that in an emergency his first thought is always _protect! Defend! Take care!_

Supreme intellect doesn’t come to him at the cost of human instinct; the most important thing he’s ever learned is to acknowledge his panic and his fears so that they can’t blindside him in an emergency. This is bad, this is awful, look the truth of things in the eyes, move on to plan contingencies that are buttressed by already knowing what the worst possible outcome is. People who think he’s single-minded don’t know the _half_ of it.

Twenty-odd years of bitter vicious training, and all that he’s gotten good at is letting rationality come in quicker; Bruce has no doubt that it would take more than an act of God to make him stop feeling desperate to put himself between the people he cares about and any and all dangers. He can’t quite make out the make and model of the car from here, and he’s pretty sure they’re not in Gotham, because he would _know_ if they were, but commandeering a vehicle seems like the best idea available to him at the moment.

Feet leaden and body heavy, it takes an almost supernatural amount of effort to pull himself away from where he’d found himself. Head down, one step at a time. He’s had his back broken, this is nothing compared to that first round of aching, screaming physiotherapy. This is for Alfred and Dick, and if a spinal injury couldn’t keep him down then, strange happenstances cannot stop him now.

What may prove a bigger challenge though is this woman abruptly in his face, holding a microphone in front of her glitzy dress, not someone he knows but clearly from the family of conventionally-attractive-functionally-dull television hosts that pepper the world. She talks at him, and Bruce struggles to make out her words just as much as he struggles to make out her face.

“Sorry, darling,” he drawls, making an effort to rake his eyes up and down her body as he registers sequins in the dress but not the damned colour. “Mind repeating yourself?”

The vague amorphous cloud of classically-pretty gives off a sense of mild irritation and professionalism fuelled by a sizable income, and that, at least, is a familiar response to the charms of Bruce’s alter-alter-ego. “I _said_ , Bruce, how do you feel about meeting your first bachelor?”

Several thoughts collide all at once, slamming into each other with such force that thinking briefly comes to a complete halt. Lucky him, he’s trained so many contingencies into his body and mind that a go-to soundbite for talking about donors at the Foundation works his jaw while his brain scrambles.

“Oh, you know, it’s _such_ an honour to be here, and to get to do all this, really, I love…. Bachelors.” Insert an overemphasised wink _here_.

What does she mean, ‘bachelor’? Is this some sort of charity auction? Why would anyone try to flog Dick to Bruce? Obviously there’s no bid that’s too high for his eldest son, no line Bruce wouldn’t cross if he thought Dick would let him get away with it, and his inability to be anything but a father doting to the point of idiocy is not news anywhere in the world by now. Why would a charity auction be televised, and why would he be the centre of attention anyways?

He runs through what he knows of the intercept between the concept of bachelors and television programmes, and all he can think of is that strange, strange show where a lot of one gender compete in mentally and emotionally gruelling ways to win the show and the one member of the opposite gender everyone’s allowed to throw themselves at.

(His kids had declared that he needed to know more about the world around him outside of crime-fighting and saving the world on occasion, and as a result once every other Saturday night Bruce is treated to increasingly terrible reality tv.)

Is that the premise of this? Some charity popularity contest? It sounds like something he might sign up for, if he’s done anything particularly troublesome and Lucius needed appeasing, but it’s still so _dumb_.

Of course he’s going to pick Dick. Twelve suitors, ten weeks, eight challenges, whatever permutation and combination of people and places and problems, obviously he’s going to choose Dick, even if Dick still hasn’t looked at him, still hasn’t acknowledged that Bruce is there, trying to get to him, barely held back by a woman with a microphone.

It’s _absurd_ , and it’s a struggle to not let that thought show on his face. He keeps saying bland, vague things while teetering on the edge of public indecency by way of leering, and just waits for Dick to come up to him.

Bruce is willing to admit that there are many aspects to time travel and parallel universes that are currently beyond his ability to fully grasp, but there’s no world-time-universe-plane where he doesn’t care about Dick, so all he needs is to be patient and lie in wait until an opportunity presents itself to him.

He thinks it’s come, when another limousine pulls up. He’s going to accidentally stumble into the woman, maybe rip a strap so that the flash of her bra gets everyone’s attention (these are dire times and he is at present an unforgivably desperate man), and then gallantly call off the shooting so that he can bundle up his son and butler into this car and just _leave_.

Bruce shifts his weight, angles himself towards where Alfred has a stately hand on the handle, and plans around how to extricate the newest candidate and commandeer their car.

Everything is ready-steady-almost go, but then the door opens, and oh, it’s just going to be a bad day all around, huh.

-

“Bruce? Bruce, can you hear me? Goddamnit, you passed out the last time I came by for brunch too. Is it because I brought doughnut holes both times? Rico’s is cursed, it’s cursed and so is brunch. How is he, Alfred?”

Alfred looks a little ruffled, which speaks volumes to how serious the situation is. “We have a great many stairs between the kitchen and the Cave, but I managed to bring him down without too much fuss. He’s hooked up to fluids, and the first course of the broad-spectrum antitoxins have been administered, as well as a scratch test on his arm. I am, of course, running tests on the last few items of food and drink that sir has consumed, as well as on his blood and spit, but the results are not yet available.”

Dick breathes a sigh of relief; Alfred’s ability to take care of them is masterful but his skill of looking after Bruce is absolutely unparalleled. There is a reason why for Alfred’s 60th the whole family had come together in t-shirts Steph had gotten made, black with gold embroidery, saying ‘Villains Work Hard, But Alfred Works Harder.’ There’s a reason why Bruce not only wore the shirt, but has also kept it, wearing it around the house whenever he knows Alfred’s especially annoyed with him.

Alfred’s amazing, and Alfred works miracles, but trouble’s always hankering for Bruce and poison is so, so difficult to deal with. Alfred and Dick both know this, and they know that if Bruce doesn’t show any signs of improvement in the next half hour, the second course of antitoxins will start, and those are stronger and harsher, the third course is worse still, and it becomes a race to the bottom, trying to figure out how to save a man by coming a little closer to killing him each time.

They stare at each other, then at Bruce when the man groans and frowns in his unconsciousness.

“He kept calling my name,” Alfred says softly, hand tight and resolute on Bruce’s shoulder in unflinching support. “And now, master Dick, he appears to be calling for you.”

Dick goes round to the other side of the cot, and gently squeezes Bruce’s limp hand. “I’m here,” he tells Bruce, willing him to feel it. “But it’s the third Sunday of the month, Alfred. You know that means that-“

A half-hearted alarm starts up, with all the urgency of pleasant elevator music.

“Ah, I see we have a breach at the eastern gable of the greenhouse,” Alfred says to absolutely nobody, because absolutely everybody knows who likes to come in through the greenhouse, and why the security system for that part of the house is more like a doorbell than an actual warning.

“God,” Dick mutters under his breath, while Alfred makes a face that strongly indicates that God had better be ready to answer for some of the decisions He has made recently.

-

It’s Jason, it’s Jason, it’s _Jason_. Handsome and tall and deadly, unfolding out of the car in a crisp white shirt and tuxedo pants, jacket in the crook of an arm. He looks healthy and whole and hale, streak of white in his hair artfully pushed behind his ear, looking for all the world like a marvellous man.

Jason doesn’t turn to look at Bruce either, and that’s _fine_ , it really is, it’s par for the course of what he deserves from him, but Jason doesn’t react to seeing Dick with any affection, just a perfunctory handshake before he’s moved back to keep some space between them. Jason didn’t even say hello to _Alfred_ , and that’s the clearest indication so far that whatever is going on here, it’s not a mass-drugging issue. For one thing, the dose that would be needed to scramble Jason’s brain would be enough to kill every single other person here, without a doubt, and for another, Jason could be bleeding out from 90% of his body while a king cobra is at his neck dosing him up with enough venom to take out a herd of elephants, and he would still greet Alfred. Jason crosses lines that Bruce despairs of and disagrees with, but Jason also struggles with undercover missions because of a sweet, sweet inability to pretend not to care when he does.

It might be a parallel universe, then, because time travel no longer makes sense, but it’s statistically unlikely for the chips to align and have Bruce in what amounts to a dating show with his sons. Stress can cause premature greying, maybe, but the electric green tint to Jason’s eyes is all Lazarus pit. At this point, Bruce is beginning to suspect that he’s hallucinating everything. Not because anything feels particularly unreal, other than how everyone except his family appears less _whole_ , but because after running through all possible explanations, that’s the simplest one.

He can’t remember his last lucid moment, can’t remember anything much outside of right now, but if the premise is that he’s off his head, he can work with that. A “Superman,” pitched under his breath, urgent and demanding, yields no results. He can draw the parameters now, and try to plan around what is least likely to damage his psyche. Thanks to all the previous accrued damages to his psyche, Bruce has a clear idea of what he can and can’t take, which is good.

His brain’s making all his sons gather here, he suspects, and that’s very, very bad. The woman is still talking to him, talking _at_ him, and Bruce needs more data to work with. The most important thing that currently needs consideration is this:

In this hallucination, this fever nightmare, does his family care about him? Not general pleasantries like a smile and a nod and a wave, but deep deep down in that place where it’s all screaming instinct and all it screams is _family_ or _foe_.

So he just smiles benignly at the host, turns so that he’s facing Dick, Jason, and Alfred, and raises his hands to cup his mouth. There’s an entire language of signals they use in the field to determine the state of things, words rotating in and out and swapped and disfigured and built up, but Bruce thinks there’s one key word that he could never ignore from any of them, and that he hopes they wouldn’t ignore from him.

Bruce takes a deep breath, and as best he can, shouts “Help!” at the group of some of the world’s best men. He can’t remember the last time he’d shouted for help and meant _help_ _me_ , and he’s almost curious how his off-centre brain will make everyone respond to that.

It says a lot about the sort of life he leads, to find so much comfort in confirming an ongoing hallucination.

-

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

Dick doesn’t question the timing; Jason rolling into the Cave just as Bruce started to convulse and scream “ _Help_!” is pretty par for the course. “Hey Jaybird,” he greets back, not looking up from where he’s doing his damnedest to try to keep Bruce still. They have padded restraints, because trawling through Gotham nights means they show up at the Cave with all sorts sometimes, but tying Bruce down like a rabid dog isn’t anyone’s idea of a fun time, so here Dick is, sprawled over his father who is still so dumb strong this far under.

Quick as anything Jason’s on the other side of the bed, heavy hand on Bruce’s sternum, the other on his shoulder. “I told you brunch is cursed. What the hell is going on?”

Alfred apparates to his side, wearing nitrile gloves and holding a tray of what looks like breakfast kept under a plastic lid. “Sir passed out while enjoying a light breakfast sandwich. I have managed to isolate some strange compounds in the bread, but the toxin is not one we have encountered before. I believe my next move will be to-”

It happens in Dick’s head half a second before it happens in real life, and him shouting “Jay, no!” serves as nothing more than background music to Jason smacking the lid off the tray and grabbing the innocuous bagel. Alfred’s reactions are a little faster (and isn’t that embarrassing, god), and he has his hand on Jason’s wrist, an effort at restraint.

Too fucking bad that Jason Todd’s not really known for his restraint. With an almighty heave Jason’s got man and bun pulled up close, and he’s biting into the bagel before Dick can vault over the bed.

Alfred and Dick freeze in place, as one-man toxicology-lab-disaster Jason takes his time to chew and swallow, not betraying much barring a case of the sweats and his pupils blowing out. “A’ight, before anyone starts yelling at me, can we just big time confirm that the Joker’s not here and holding a crowbar?”

He isn’t, of course, though Jason’s unblinking wide-eyed stare somewhere behind Alfred convinces DIck to take a second look. Alfred merely rolls his eyes, putting the tray aside and pulling Jason to sit on a nearby stool. “If he were, Master Jason, I would be more than happy to deal with him myself. It has been one of those days, I’m afraid, and my temper is wearing awfully thin. How are you?”

It takes a while for Jason to blink and breathe his way through whatever he’s seeing, before he drags his gaze back to Alfred. “Feel like shit, if that helps. It’s got a different kick to it, but it sure tastes like fuckin’ Scarecrow gas in the mouth.” He works his jaw around and rolls his shoulders. “Pretty sure there’s some sort of numbing agent to it, or something. Fuck, it’s giving me cotton mouth and it feels like all my feet are falling asleep.”

Alfred’s muttering “Lord give me strength,” under his breath in a way that promises absolute chaos in the very near future, checking over Jason’s vitals before heading over to the mainframe to, presumably, save the day. Dick’s still got a hold on his father, and in a moment of attempted levity, pokes fun at Jason. “What, how many feet do you think you got?”

Jason’s now looking down at himself, frowning a little. “Sure looks like at least five, to be honest.”

-

They all turn to him, but look about as disinterested as a human being could possibly be. It’s not a nice feeling, but it gives him an idea about the dimensions of him losing his mind. They either don’t know him, here, or he’s done something extra-particularly unforgivable and they have just finally given up. The former is more likely than the latter; his sons are good people, far too good for him, and Alfred’s greatest skill in an arsenal of great skills is his ability to forgive Bruce over and over and over again.

Bruce doesn’t know how he got here, but he knows he needs to try and snap out of it and wake up as quickly as he can. Who knows where he actually is, he could be bleeding out in some alleyway even as he wrenches his gaze back to blurry-woman. Hallucinogens all get you in different ways, and with some of them, once you caught the truth of it you could will yourself awake. This….doesn’t feel like that, so his aim is to go through this with as much of his sanity preserved as possible. Batman as a concept is more impervious to mental torture than he is physical, and he’s pretty impervious to both as far as the common man is concerned.

In practice, it’s mostly the ability to brutally compartmentalise the hell out of his life experiences. It’s control, iron-fisted and unwavering, and it’s why toxins and magic and everything that can take his control from him are really high on the list of what Bruce finds absolutely intolerable. 

He doesn’t know when his mind will turn on him, he just knows it will, and the premonition of future misery has his back tight and teeth grinding. 

A limousine appears, right on cue mid-breakdown, and Bruce knows who’s going to come out of it. He wonders if Tim’s going to come out some older version of himself, to match Jason and Dick, but figures that it’s going to be maximum trauma if it’s Tim exactly as Bruce last saw him that gets hurt, somehow a victim of Bruce’s brain.

It would have been nice if in this dreamland Tim was up to his usual tricks, asleep standing up somewhere after spending three days staring into an investigative abyss, hopped up on tea supplemented with more sugar than the FDA would consider humane. It would have been nice if all his sons, just this once, avoided him the way they sometimes did in real life. Being alone is a lot less torturous than waiting for the other shoe to drop on his children.

Bruce groans, and decides to just fuck it. He politely pushes the woman who is still, somehow, chattering, and lies down right on the red carpet, hands covering his eyes.

He’ll be okay in a minute; he just doesn’t want to see Alfred let Tim out and have yet another family member not know he’s real. He’ll get up again, he really will, he’s just tired.

He just needs a break.

-

“Why the sweet Jesusing fuck is his heart rate dropping all of a sudden?” Jason swears as he dives for the AED tucked in a cabinet, snapping the case open even as Bruce abruptly goes limp in the bed, breathing getting eerily slow.

“The hell do you think I would know?” Dick shouts back, who is taking matters into his own hands and is soundly slapping the devil out of Bruce’s cheeks. “C’mon, c’mon, Bruce, wake the hell up!” When it doesn’t work, he jumps atop the bed, straddling Bruce around the hips, and gets ready to do CPR. He’s well-trained; push comes to shove and Dick can CPR the life back into someone for up to 3 hours. 

One of those weird paranoid Batman training schemes that always seem unspeakably dumb until they inevitably pay off, urgh.

He’s going “Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Stayin’ Alive!”’ slightly hysterically under his breath while Jason waits for the defibrillator to gather enough charge when Tim sprints in, still sleep-tousled and pyjamaed, holding a vial of something that fluoresces yellow and bubbles like a demon. 

“Hey! Hey! Tim! Ah!” Dick calls out, still on beat, a man on a mission.

“Hi Dick,” Tim calls back, before he jabs the EpiPen of Doom right into Bruce’s thigh. The concoction floods in, gelatinous and menacing as anything. Christ, Dick saw the needle on that beast; it’s not all bad that Bruce is unconscious.

He doesn’t let up on his CPR, though, and Jason’s staring at the heartbeat monitor and ECG display like they hold the keys to the universe, paddles charged up and ready to go. Within moments Bruce seems to stabilize, heart and breathing picking back up. The _problem_ with being the most athletic 40-something year old in the world is that Bruce’s resting heart rate hovers around the 30 to 40 bpm mark, and when that plummets it really just doesn’t have far to go.

Jason evidently is thinking something similar when he finally puts the AED away, sighing like he’s personally offended. “It’s not a cute look to go ‘round having a heart so lazy, damn.”

Tim’s breathing heavily, still holding the empty syringe pressed into Bruce’s leg. “Brunch is _extremely_ cursed,” he says, reluctant to move. “The one time I oversleep for the monthly meet-up, and this is what happens.” He looks up, blinks, and absently waves at Jason. “Hi, Jason. Alfred said I should knock you out for eating poisoned food.”

Jason rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling. “He’s the only one with any goddamned common sense in this household. How’d you figure out what was ailing the big guy, anyways?”

Tim grins. “ _Because_ you ate poisoned food. Alfie said you started hallucinating but also like you were kinda going numb? That’s a pretty specific combo, and not a lot of stuff can do that in tandem with Scarecrow’s stuff. This one’s,” he jiggles the empty canister, and Dick feels the need to emphasise that the _needle is still stuck in Bruce_ , “a counter to hemlock, and there’re like 5 more vials that I was going to go through.”

Dick and Jason look at each other, and they both groan. “Let me guess,” Dick says, struggling to keep down a smile, “Fresh off of B’s Introductory Poisons 101, huh? God, when was the last time I heard someone say ‘hemlock’ like that’s a normal thing to say?”

“Hey, Socrates got murdered by a hemlock sip, it’s one of the cooler poisons,” Jason says with absolutely zero conviction. “Lemme guess, Replacement, bet you got a perfect score on the last pop quiz. ‘Draw and label the molecular structure of the Botulinum Toxin for 5 extra points’ haunts my dreams way the fuck more than being murdered.” He dramatically shivers. “The truest torture is a Chem exam nobody wants.”

Tim blinks at them like this is news to him. “I did Intro P years ago, and _yes_ , maybe I did get full marks for it. I just like going over the slides every once in a while for self-study!”

Dick laughs while he ruffles Tim's hair. “You’re _such_ a good kid,” he says with whole-grain affection. “Thanks for saving the day, Tim.”

“Yeah, you huge nerd,” Jason says, fond and deeply offensive.

-

Somebody touches his cheek, a gentle tap-tap. Bruce doesn’t want to open his eyes and acknowledge what’s going on in this unreal reality, but he feels flooded with adrenaline all of a sudden, and the malaise that insisted on a nap’s completely evaporated.

With tremendous reluctance, he opens his eyes, and sees Tim looking down at him with his usual look of unstifled curiosity. “Are you all right?” Tim asks him politely, and it’s a fake Tim, Bruce knows, because there’s no hint of dark circles under the eyes, and his eyes don’t do that thing where they can’t stay and focus in one place too long because there’s too much to see.

They’re steady, and they’re looking at him with a complete absence of recognition, and Bruce was 100% right. It is significantly worse to be unknown to the Tim who went out on patrol with him yesterday than to some made-up older version of him. 

“I’m fine,” he says, because it’d be rude not to answer. “I’m just going to stay here until everything blows over.”

Tim crouches down next to him, tucked up tight with his chin on his knees. You’ll crease your pants, Bruce thinks and doesn’t say. Tim’s permanently in mild disarray, and it’s grown to become a comfort to Bruce. A fully primped and pressed Tim, neat and alert and free of tea stains, is a Tim in a time of crisis.

Crises don’t tend to end well for Batman and his ilk.

They just stare at each other, and it reminds him of when Tim had arrived on the doorstep to the Manor, vibrating and immoveable with the truth of things. Tim, small and scrawny and determined to bear the weight of being Batman’s Robin. 

Bruce, being much too weak to say no and keep saying no to what amounts to having a child soldier self-enlist (again).

It’s not as clear-cut as people expect, the line between Batman and Bruce Wayne, except when it is. Tensions rise high when the mantle of fatherhood is a heavier, deader weight than the Bat’s cape, sons die in a shack somewhere beaten to a dead, dead pulp, and some mornings Bruce wakes up and he mostly just hates both sides of him.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” TIm asks again.

“I don’t think so, no,” Bruce says, and waits for things to escalate.

(In the distance, there is the sound of a car pulling up. This universe holds its breath.)

-

Tim is hard at the work in the lab, Alfred assisting him, and Dick feels a little bad that he never got into toxicology and pharmacology and microbiology and the like. Bludhaven’s plenty scummy, but it’s the sort of scum you can wipe out with elbow grease, and chemical and biological warfare’s a bit beyond the average operating budget of the local bad guys. He still gets a little Krebby any time he thinks about that one summer where Bruce thought it was a great idea to get Dick to learn about enzymes and gene splicing and all sorts of stuff that necessitate a young hyperactive boy to sit very still and think very long about very small things he can’t see with his own damn eyes.

Jason’s better at focusing, but while he’s got less of a biological imperative to move and keep moving, he’s a lot worse at paying attention when he doesn’t want to; that’s why neither of them are in the lab, and are instead idly playing poker on Bruce’s chest.

It’s a little disrespectful, probably, to do this on your unconscious father, but Dick’s feeling pretty jittery and not entirely willing to lose physical contact with Bruce. Whatever Jason’s feelings on the matter, he’d obliged Dick’s casual invitation to a round, and now here they are with a pack of cards Jason usually has in his leather jacket, doughnut balls acting as currency.

Lord, this is how you get ants. Bruce’s shirt is covered in powdered sugar as they aggressively try to out-cheat each other.

Underneath their cards and balls and hands, Bruce’s breathing stutters, and he seems to let out a long, resigned sigh.

Dick’s got a read on things, because if there is a God they have a goddamned awful sense of humour, especially as it pertains to Bruce and everything Bruce cares about.

As if summoned, the door to the medbay slams open, and it’s Dami there dressed like a normal boy right up until you spot the sword in hand.

The shrieked “Father!” with the inauspicious crack, though, that’s all young-boy-screaming-at-the-sight-of-their-father-(figure)-on-his-deathbed all over, and is a staple in Wayne Manor. If Alfred’s got a traumatic childhood memory of something similar, then they’d have a full house.

Dick sighs too, and holds up a doughnut hole. “Hungry?”

-

The world blurs, the way too-small font gets when your eyes start to waver from fatigue. Bruce is sitting now on a chair masquerading as a throne, all velvet red upholstery and gold gilding. It’s hideous, and it’s ominous as all hell. They must be rolling into the endgame now, and Bruce feels no closer to parsing out the future than he did before. 

His sons are arranged all in a row in front of him, with Alfred leading Damian over. God, Damian isn’t even scowling, and there’s no sign of that awkward half-step he gets when he’s trying to smuggle an oversized sword down a tuxedo pant. 

It’s not real, Bruce tells himself, tries to make himself believe. It’s not real, remember all the reasons this is not real, because things are going to go down really soon, feels like, and he’ll be no good to anybody if despair gets him right between the eyes.

The faceless woman is back at it, still sparkling and indistinct, the concept of a microphone in her hand as she talks about the handsome bachelors and what a night it’s been. Bruce is testing his range of mobility as the woman stands in front of the cameras, and finds that the oppressive weight that dragged his feet feels lighter now. He can make it from where he’s sat to the line-up of children in seconds, and that’s important to note. Given the way he’s barely biting back paralysing fear in the face of the _premonition_ of danger coming upon the kids, Bruce is grimly certain that whatever’s happened to him is Scarecrow-adjacent. If he’s still struggling through this hallucination that comes complete with a goddamn backstory to build up the anticipation, it’s probably a new concoction that Alfred is struggling to break.

The only way out is through; if he overcomes the peak, he’ll be out free on the other side. He’s never going to _stop_ being afraid for his children, obviously, but he can overcome the fear that he won’t be enough to stop them from suffering. 

He can, and right now, he must.

So Bruce keeps as calm as he can, centres himself and shifts a little in his seat to plant his feet more firmly in the ugly carpet, and bides his time. There are three entry points into this courtyard, there are four boys, five cameramen, six thousand ways for things to go wrong.

He’s already up to Contingent Plan Number 1322, so if Bruce Wayne’s brain thinks he can trip up Bruce Wayne when the stakes are this high, then he is a fucking idiot.

Bruce almost wants to smile; things are looking up.

-

Damian’s a funny one. He’s seen more brutality than any of them had when they were his age; some extremely dense front-loading of trauma, and a Bat lifestyle doesn’t promise that things get better as you get older. Half the time Damian acts like he’s older than every one of them barring Alfred, and that’s only because Damian intrinsically respects that Alfred can cook where everyone else left to their own devices would have a diet focused on proteins (for the muscles!) and whatever vice slash emotional crutch they can get their hands on.

So Damian is hard and brittle and sometimes he’s also a little awful, but right now he’s just mostly a scared kid trying not to show it. Funny how goddamn infectious Scarecrow’s hot bullshit can get, thinks Dick, as he restrains Damian from slashing Bruce’s belly open in the world’s most ill-advised attempt at a stomach pumping.

“D, Tim and Alfred are working on a cure, all right, so how’s about we cool it with the whole ritual disembowelling thing?”

“Unhand me Richard!” Damian shrieks, and the break down the middle can’t be good for the throat. “I will _not_ leave Father’s wellbeing to Drake! He is a damned idiot who didn’t even _tell me_ there was an emergency, I was sat at the dining table like a fool while all this while…”

Everyone’s guilty of that particular crime, of course, forgetting about Damian in the heat of the moment. Jason’s also guilty of not being very helpful right now, as he just watches on with a look of vague indulgence, eating up doughnut holes he hasn’t earned. Dick tries not to sigh, and forcibly reminds himself that looking after crazy younger siblings is the classic curse of the eldest (and best-looking) child. He hugs Damian tighter, and holds him steady. “Sorry, Dami, it’s been all systems go from when Bruce passed out. Tim’s already nullified the paralytic that was shutting down his lungs, and now they just need to figure out how to deal with the Scare Toxin 2.0. Gutting your father’s probably not a good idea, don’t you think?”

Jason, who is currently racing ahead of his competitors for the title of ‘Worst Little Brother By Far, Jesus, Jason, Stop’, snorts and tips back in his chair. “You know, I say we let the little guy have a go. God knows Mister Repressed over here sure could do with a loosening of his bowels, you feel me?”

Luckily, the current frontrunner for ‘Best Little Brother By Far, Not To Play Favourites Or Anything, Tim, But It’s Definitely You’ runs in with Alfred at his heels, shouting “Stop encouraging him!”. Tim has a tiny glass vial in his hand, cradled like it’s a reliquary bearing the tears of the Lord Himself, and a needle and syringe that could probably down a wildebeest. Alfred is outfitted with an IV stand rolling beside him like a third leg, the liquid in the bag swishing like a particularly important water balloon. 

Doughnut holes, needle holes, assholes. What a day full of holes, or something. Dick’s not too sure how he’s meant to interpret all of this, and so he decides not to, doubling down on securing Damian to stop him from flying at Tim and accidentally destroying the best hope they have of dealing with this whole mess.

Tim pushes Damian and Dick away from Bruce’s side, steadfastly ignoring the mess they’ve made of Bruce’s poker board chest. “I’m not even going to ask,” he says, and he means it with every ounce of his soul. He pushes Bruce’s sleeve up, takes a breath and reminds himself that he’s checked the composition of the potential cure a dozen times by now. Best case scenario, it works, and even in the worst case, they’re only risking liver failure in the next three to four hours.

Looking around at the tableau of people keeping vigil over Bruce, Tim suspects that there won’t be a shortage of donors anyways, so it’s a risk well worth taking.

“Well,” he says, amazed that his hands are so still for someone running on minimal sleep and even less coffee, “here goes nothing.”

He sticks the needle in a split second before Damian shouts “What do you _mean_ ‘nothing’?”, and the antidote’s coursing through Bruce’s veins before Damian can break free and create a second casualty. 

Alfred ignores all the hullabaloo to put in the IV line into Bruce’s other arm, and he starts the drip. Amidst all the commotion and all the stress, he looks down at Bruce’s slack, unconscious face, and feels a very gentle sort of jealousy accompanying the usual teeth-grinding feeling of concern.

Jason taps him on the hand and holds out the bag of doughnut holes. 

Alfred sighs. “You really will ruin your appetite for brunch, Master Jason.”

Jason just smiles, and he looks as guileless and as sweet as he did when he barely came past Alfred’s waist. “Alfie, it’s gonna take a hell of a lot more than somebody else almost dying and me eating some junk to turn me off your food.” He holds the bag out again, insistent and dear. 

This time, Alfred takes it. He can’t help feeling just a little bit charmed. “Just for that, Master Jason, you may count upon getting a double-portion of dessert.” 

Even if brunch may be delayed because Alfred fully intends to beat Scarecrow over the head with an electric whisk for the next three hours after this.

-

At least Alfred isn’t on the dais, thinks Bruce. That’s four targets instead of five, one less thing he needs to worry for. It seems like a tremendous oversight, for his psyche to leave out Alfred as he crafts his idea of a worst-case scenario, but it’s also entirely possible that Alfred is so grounding a presence that even in the depths of delusion, he’s doing his best to support Bruce.

It’s a heartening thought. Bruce looks and sees and thinks and waits, feeling anticipation build. The lights seem sharper now, the edges between his family and the rest of the world becoming more distinct, like a sign to say _look here, and nowhere else_.

The boys are arranged by age, Damian furthest to the left and Dick furthest to the right. In an emergency, which this will be, Bruce would have no problem just picking up both Damian and Tim and running. Jason and Dick he would need to grab one at a time to get up to any sort of decent speed, which is not ideal, but it’s better than nothing. He doesn’t see snipers skulking in the balconies that overlook the courtyard, doesn’t hear the quiet undercurrent of people planning murder sneaking into place. It doesn’t mean much in a hallucination, but Bruce is banking on his psyche being far too particular to leave out such clues. 

Another blank-faced human-approximate comes out into the courtyard, bearing a silver tray with champagne flutes. All the boys take one, even Damian, and the waiter finally proceeds up the steps to Bruce with one special gold-rimmed glass.

He accepts it, and unreality starts to crystalise.

Off to the side, the woman raises her own glass. “A toast! To finding the right man for Mister Wayne!”

The boys knock back their drinks, and Bruce doesn’t, because she’d said man, singular, when these are all the right men, plural, and _his is the only glass that’s different_.

Damian collapses first; that small of a body with the same amount of poison as all the rest, it’s inevitable. Tim sways a little, and then he’s down and out too. If this were truly real instead of just seemingly real, Jason would hold out longest because between the Pit and the ghoulish training he can metabolise most anything out there to kill him, but he’s writhing on the ground in moments. Dick manages to stumble a few steps forwards, flute still in hand, before he finally falls too.

“Now then, Mister Wayne, it’s time to choose!”

And this, Bruce thinks distantly as he holds the one antidote dose in a glass close to shattering in his grasp, is the truest stuff of nightmares.

-

The room goes quiet when Bruce starts writhing on the table, eyelids flickering as he grunts and groans. He was quieter when they’d had to set his broken leg without any anaesthesia, and isn’t that an illuminating view into what it takes to be the man in Batman?

Dick is Extremely Stressed Out, and is meaner than he means to be when he looks at Tim. “Why is he getting worse?”

Tim’s gone pale and is going paler still. “I don’t know,” he admits. “Usually as soon as you administer the antitoxin recovery happens right away. This should have worked-”

‘Should have’ isn’t particularly reassuring right now, and has had a long history of biting Bats and their associates in the ass; it’s another one of those kinds of days, looks like. 

Damian isn’t having any of it. “You’ve made him worse, Drake! I knew we couldn’t trust you to do anything right, Father is dying because of you. I should have gotten rid of you when I had the chance.” He sounds like he’s never meant it more.

Tim doesn’t even disagree with him, just keeps staring at the puncture wound in the crease of Bruce’s elbow, at the remains of the little antidote that couldn’t. It’s like a metaphor for his life, at this point. The shoddy patch job that didn’t work, the plaster too insignificant to cover the wound, the cure that didn’t heal anything.

Everybody quiets down when Tim doesn’t rise to the bait, even Damian who had been near frothing at the mouth for a fight. The fear gas isn’t deadly, usually, but these aren’t usual times. There are things that could be done, people they could call, things they could do to keep Bruce running long enough for more help to come in.

That’s the thing, though, the absolute worst thing about the fucking toxin; it’s so metaphysically infectious, that the concept of a dying Bruce has rooted them all to the ground. Smooth as anything, it saps away the will to try and try harder, bit by terrible bit.

Bruce is breaking out into cold sweat now, movements growing increasingly violent as he keeps gasping out their names, and isn’t that just a sight to behold?

Tim breaks his own spell first, holding a hand up to his mouth like he’s trying to hold back the desire to throw up. “I’m going to go back to the lab, I must have missed something, there’s got to be _something_ I can do.”

Dick nods, mouth dry. “Sounds like a great idea, Timmy. I’ll stay here and stop Bruce from convulsing all over. D, can you keep his legs still?”

It speaks to the heaviness of the situation that Damian doesn’t do more than glare at Dick before he goes to do his bidding, securely holding Bruce down by his ankles. The blanket had gone flying when Bruce had started convulsing; Damian tugs it back to cover Bruce’s bare feet. The thin skin and battered bones look vulnerable in the harsh light of the medbay, and Damian doesn’t want to look at them. Socks, he thinks. He’s going to festoon his father in so many socks, thick woolly fluffy ones for swanning about the Manor in, and things will be fine.

He grips Bruce’s ankles tighter, and wills whatever spark of magic he may or may not have to come out and do its damned job (can’t leave it all to Drake, can he?).

Jason remains unusually quiet, still in his chair, close by Bruce’s shoulder. He remembers that first hit of the toxin, fresh from the bagel, the immediate confidence that the Joker was there with a crowbar, only this time it’s not just Jason tied up in some shack somewhere in the snow.

This time the fucker was in the room with him, right by Alfred and Dick, right by Bruce who’s unconscious and more useless even than usual, and the greatest, most unbearable fear had been that this time, someone else would die from the blood in their lungs, and this time, he’ll be the one too late to stop it. 

Alfred said that Bruce had been calling out for all of them, hadn’t said anything but their names and ‘help’, and he thinks he can guess the shape of the nightmare Bruce is seeing. The bare bones of it, five snapped ribs digging into a soft lung, the thing that’s making Bruce choke. Tim’s a certifiable genius, but a toxin in the blood’s a lot easier to get rid of than a demon in the head. 

Jason’s fortunately a master at both, at this point, and he suspects that there’s something he can do.

With uncharacteristic gentleness, he brushes Bruce’s hair off his face and tucks it behind an ear. He moves his hand down until he has a sure grip on the nape of Bruce’s neck, secure and confident, and squeezes just a little. “Hey, B,” Jason says conversationally, not looking up from Bruce’s twisted face. “I don’t know what you’re seeing, but I’m gonna guess it’s some fun times involving us.” He drags his chair closer, the legs screaming across the concrete. “Dying horribly, probably, I sure fucking know what you’re like.”

He thinks about the rush of horror that had filled him, and how Alfred’s steady hold on his wrist had helped, how hearing his name being called had helped.

“Whatever it is you’re seeing, it’s not real. Promise you it’s not, ‘cos I bet it’s some dumb thing that wouldn’t have a chance of actually hurting us in real life, because you’re like, the world’s most overbearing parental figure.” Introductory Poisons 101, a Wilderness Survival Skills Camp for a pack of vigilantes haunting greater metropolitan Gotham, a field guide for identifying the warning signs of a rabies infection. Three thousand and a half Powerpoint slides updated with the determination of a man who refuses to be caught out unawares ever again. Jason wants to scream as much as he wants to laugh. “So I’m just gonna tell you right now, that whatever decision you have to make, whatever it is you decide to do to try and save us in your head, you’re doing enough, okay? We came into this trusting you, and whatever hell it is that you got going on, we’re gonna come out of it still trusting you.”

Jesus, it’s embarrassing needing to say these things that need to be said in front of other people. This is why Jason had tried to hold out on making monthly brunch an official thing, and his premonition had been 20/20, urgh. The sole silver lining is that Bruce is unconscious and _cannot_ quote him on any of this.

Still, whatever his grievances and anger and dissatisfaction, it’s a point beyond contention that Jason absolutely doesn’t want to see anybody in this family hurt. Even Bruce. Maybe especially Bruce, on days like these. 

“Do what you have to do,” he says easily. “I can take a hit or twelve, and I got a great track record of coming back, you know? Make the call, and just wake the fuck up.”

God, the temptation for a dramatic slap is almost overwhelming. Instead, Jason absently brushes the fine hairs by Bruce’s nape with a thumb, and hopes for the best.

-

His first instinct is to go for Damian. Damian’s the smallest by far, and the poison will take him first. If he gets the antidote to him, then he’s buying time to figure out a cure for the rest of them. Best case scenario, he can figure a way out of this. Worst case scenario, everyone dies except for Damian. He lets down three of his sons, and the one that does survive gets to know that the only reason he lived is because the others didn’t.

It’s twisting his stomach, twisting his brain, and the panic’s ratcheting up as they start dribbling a bit of blood and convulsing. He has to choose, he has one cure and he has to choose, how is he meant to _choose_ , how is he supposed to come out through this in one piece? Bruce can’t even pull himself out of his chair, and the edges of the world are starting to ominously fade to black. It’s too late to say hey, how about you let me drink four shots of poison instead, please? It’s too late to do anything, why hadn’t he moved the _moment_ he suspected foul play masquerading as champagne? How is he too late again?

What is the point of him, other than to spectacularly fail when he’s needed the most?

Deep breath in, slow breath out. He tries to remember that this is likely a hallucination, but it doesn’t help, so Bruce shoves all other thoughts out of his head, and makes himself move.

It’s triage; a sip of antidote given to everyone, as much as he can spare for each. He could give all of it to just one son and hope for the best, but whatever the outcome of that, the decision-making process behind picking one to live and three to die is going to cause so much more fucking damage than this, so he doesn’t think about it. Doesn’t think about anything, just tips his glass into Damian’s mouth, then Tim’s, then Dick.

He’s got Jason propped in his arms, just the littlest bit of the antidote left in his glass, and grief is already settling in because isn’t this a familiar scene? He holds the flute up to Jason’s mouth, and pulls back when he hears the softest little mumbles. “‘s not real,” he hears Jason say, and abruptly warmth blooms from the back of his neck, running down his spine. Jason’s words come in and out of focus, like a voice over the phone trying to whisper over static. “Trust….you.” More static. “Wake the fuck up.”

The last line comes over more strongly, the warmth at his nape squeezes harder, and Bruce drags in a desperate breath. He feeds the last of the liquid carefully into Jay’s mouth, because it doesn’t hurt to be careful, and tries to focus on the grounding feeling that’s holding him by the neck. “Jason?” he calls out, right at the sky instead of the man in his arms, because he feels close to cracking it.

-

“Holy shit, Jay, it’s working!”

It had been soft, but they all heard Bruce call for Jason after the world’s most heartening speech. Bruce even seemed to be pressing into Jason’s steady hold, and Dick joins in on the action, commandeering a hand and squeezing it tight. “C’mon, Bruce, you gotta wake up. You’re always the one that gets testy whenever we’re late for brunch. I’m starving, and not even your paranoid brain’s gonna keep me down, so just wake up already!”

Fingers twitch in his hands, and Dick wants to vault off the top of something very tall while he whoops.

Not to be outdone, Damian starts shaking Bruce by his ankles like he’s trying to swing some extremely unwieldy skipping rope. “Yes, Father, I would not allow myself to be killed inside or outside your mind, so you may as well give up and just wake up.” The shaking becomes more intense, and it’s almost funny to see Bruce’s heavily-muscled legs flopping about. 

Alfred eyes the EEG read-out, and sees the signs of a man fighting through a nightmare. Fighting desperately, inching ever so slowly towards wakefulness. He’s not usually one for loud cheering or whooping, but what’s a butler to do but provide for his charge? Alfred rounds the table, right by where Jason is, and politely clears his throat. “I shall fetch Master Tim, as this does seem to be working. If you will excuse me,” he says as he leans down and presses a palm to the curve of Bruce’s cheek, “I’ll see you momentarily, sir.”

The touch lingers, and Alfred disappears on the wings of a soft sigh from their communal patient.

Dick and Damian continue shouting encouragement from the top of their lungs, deciding that the best strategy is the loudest one, while Jason stays quiet and keeps a firm hold on Bruce. Bruce’s eyelids flutter harder and harder, like consciousness is only a moment away, and when Tim comes in with the largest needle to date with something that looks like hot pink radioactive waste, the shouting just gets more energetic. 

It’s so _dumb_ , and it’s so _sweet_ , thinks Jason. Dick and Tim and Damian are all on one side of Bruce, and the gentle nudges and prodding have turned into what looks like three bakers kneading a massive slab of dough, Dick working on a shoulder, Tim on a hip, and Damian on the feet. Bruce is actively groaning now from being worked over by three violent, overexcited masseuses, and is probably hopped up on whatever stimulant Tim just stabbed him full of. When he wakes up he’s going to be extremely disoriented, and probably bruised to hell and back. 

They’re all crazy, and they’re going to give Bruce motion sickness, and shit like this is maybe why Jason still shows up month after month for goddamn Brunch at the Manor. 

He’s smiling as he starts bellowing in Bruce’s ear too.

“Wake up, you old man, god, remember that whole year you secretly planted like 15 alarm clocks in my bedroom because I was a _teenager_ who liked to sleep in on the _weekends_?”

_Wake up you complete asshole_ is the pervading primary vibe in the room; _wake up, dad!_ is the secret group wish. 

Sometimes, good things do happen to vigilantes.

Bruce groans, and-

-

Things escalate really quickly from Jason’s quiet whispers. All of a sudden he’s bombarded with shouting on all sides, like the sky is screaming down at him. If that wasn’t overwhelming enough, he starts feeling warmth in patches all over him, screeching fire burning a path up his arm, and he keeps tipping to the side like he’s being shoved over.

There’s a theme to the cacophony; it’s familiar voices yelling some variation of _wake up_ , and he recognises those voices. They’re ones that he tends to be bad at turning down, all of them, and if they’re saying wake up, then he really should try.

The Woman comes up to him in her beautiful dress, catches him by the chin with her red, red nails, and Bruce looks into a face that isn’t there; the void threatens to pull him under.

“They’re dying,” she tells him, and her voice is the amalgamation of every terrible voice promising every terrible thing in every terrible Gotham alley. “Choose, Bruce Wayne, you have to _choose_.”

He looks down, at his sons lying down around him like a halo, and looks at her.

“I choose,” he says more calmly than he’s felt throughout this entire hellish experience, “to wake up.”

(Choosing just one is no fucking choice at all.)

-

The screaming continues long after Bruce wakes up, and he thinks at this point it’s just payback for him worrying them. Alfred had shown up bearing tea and sandwiches almost at the exact moment Bruce had wrenched himself awake, because the man has a sense of timing that is simply sublime. Bruce can’t hold his cup of tea himself because the last kick of drugs Tim had given him had helped kick his brain back into gear but also leaves him so strung out he’s pretty sure he could one-hit KO Killer Croc right now.

Everyone seems to find his lack of coordination exceedingly funny, even as they take turns to help him sit up and sip his drink. The hot Darjeeling helps with the cottonmouth, and nibbling a delicate little cucumber sandwich helps soften the nausea brought about by the abject despair. He idly brushes powdered sugar off his front, and looks around at his family. Nobody’s bleeding out or foaming at the mouth, and he’s never seen anything so good in his life. 

They update him on the situation as he gets his bearings; some new type of fear toxin-paralytic combo present in baked bread, the GCPD being informed and pulling the contaminated food off the shelves, Tim’s three-strep antidote composition forwarded to the pharmaceutical arm of WE for immediate production of the cure, Bruce going down harder than most, likely due to his built-up resistance to previous versions of the toxin. Damian happily outlines his plan of plucking the poison right out of Bruce’s guts, which certainly is an idea, and Bruce carefully doesn’t mention how all of them are keeping in tight contact. Jason’s got his feet propped up on the cot, and his socked feet are pressed to Bruce’s side. He woke up with Dick holding his hand, and he hasn’t dropped it yet. Tim’s leaning over the cot, body turned to face Bruce, and his elbow pokes Bruce right in the waist. A master of secrecy and deception on an average day, Damian’s taken a break from being a professional assassin and offers no apologies or excuses for just straight-up sitting on top of Bruce’s legs.

Even Alfred seems to find a thousand reasons to offer up glancing touches as he passes snacks and drinks around, oh.

He’s piled in, and it feels fantastic. 

Alfred keeps disappearing and reappearing with more and more food, and the kitchen island upstairs is usurped by Bruce’s body acting as a table for their meal. He has a worryingly warm gravy boat placed securely between his thighs, and staunchly ignores whoever it is that calls it ‘Batman Meat Juice’. A wrought iron pot full of warm tea hangs from the IV stand, and his chest is home to a platter of roast beef and mushroom tempura. He’s clearly intentionally being weighed down, because the first response to him saying he should really get up get out and get Scarecrow was greeted with a mostly-empty bag of doughnuts slammed right into his middle.

Bruce realises he probably deserved that, even if he’s less certain about deserving all of this. There’s no way to free himself barring an out-and-out brawl with all of his sons, and even if he survives that, he won’t survive Alfred who’s been bringing down the cutlery with a look of impending violence.

The atmosphere’s manic; down for the poisoning, up for the recovery, twanging every which way because everybody is clearly curious about what had taken him so deep under, but everybody also had enough sense (enough experience) not to ask.

It’s not like Bruce is famous for sharing information, either, but he’d seen them almost die in front of him. Surely, he’s learned from Jason. Surely, he knows better than to be shitty to his living children after seeing dead children.

He pours Batman’s Meat Juice over a slice of beef, and looks at it instead of at anyone. “It was a competition, with the four of you. They poisoned all of you, and I had the one antidote, and I had to choose.” He tears into the sliver of meat, still firmly avoiding eye contact. “I didn’t, because I couldn’t. All of you managed to wake me up before the final conclusion.”

And how fortunate was that? In the heat of panic, opting to parcel out the antidote had been the only thing that had made sense, but where would Bruce be if he hadn’t woken up? If the fever dream ended with all his children dead at his feet and _then_ the nightmare began?

Damian and Jason don’t give him much time to stew, because they both snort in a way that indicates maximum offence has been taken. “The Scarecrow _wishes_ he could poison me dead,” Damian states with utmost confidence, and Jason going “Even getting smashed to a pulp couldn’t keep me down, and you’re saying some shitty ass ~mystery brew~ was gonna take me out? Christ, dream me was probably taking a nap to avoid all the melodrama,” was an echo of the same thought.

Why they’re offended that Bruce’s worst nightmare is not up to snuff is a little hard to understand, but their vehement confidence in their unwillingness to die is comforting. Even the inevitable escalation of Damian and Jason trying to flex their poison resistance to each other feels familiar and warm, though Bruce twitches reflexively when Jason roars for Alfred to bring out the bagel so that they can have a showdown right now, right here, little bird. 

Bruce looks up, and Tim’s just staring at him. “To be honest, if I was enough of a dumbass to just knock back suspicious liquids in suspicious circumstances, I’d be as bad as those two,” he nods to Jason and Damian who are both currently being lectured by Alfred and being threatened with a fate worse than any quick-acting poison (“No kebabs and ‘nugs’ at the next family barbecue, indeed none for the entirety of the spring, sirs, if you so much as _say_ the word ‘bagel’ in my presence again, do you understand me?”). “You really need to worry less about us, especially not-us-us.”

Dick saunters into view, eating an unholy combination of meat and mushrooms sandwiched between custard-stuffed doughnuts. “No joke, I have and probably will keep on being the dumbass that’ll just swallow everything that looks food-shaped, but at some point you just gotta look at the boy throwing up at your feet because he ate from a bag of ancient popcorn that’s gone kinda green and go, you’re an adult human being Dick, and this is what happens when you eat your body weight in junk and black mould.” His tone is casual and light, but his eyes are sharp as anything. That’s the trick of Dick the Flying Grayson; all pomp and splendour in how he walks and talks and moves and acts, and none of it has a patch on what goes on in his head.

Bruce wonders what he’s calculating now.

It turns out to be a kiss, pressed sweetly to Bruce’s brow, a callback to the first few months of Dick’s endless sleepless nights spent curled up in Bruce’s bed. The world goes hazy, and for a moment it’s like he’s at the start of a dream that could go very well or very badly, again.

Bruce blinks, and Dick just smiles. “It’s a Robin’s job to look out for Batman, and it’s our job to look out for you. We would literally stay alive just out of spite, B. Try and come up with something more realistic next time, or you’re gonna make Scarecrow feel bad about his life’s work, okay?”

There is a bit of grease on his forehead, because a tempura-laced kiss will do that to you no matter how dapper the man who gives it, and Bruce for a hysterical moment feels tempted to never wash his face ever again. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he says, but his voice is rough and there is not a chance that he’s not an open book right now. 

“Very good, sirs.” Alfred’s voice cuts through the background chatter, uncharacteristically loud. He has a massive whisk in his hands, but there’s nothing nearby that needs it. It’s a heavy-duty one, probably more commonly used in industrial kitchens than in homes with fewer inhabitants than fingers on the average hand, but Alfred seems to be appreciating the heft. “Now that we have sorted everything out, I do beg your pardon. I made a promise to myself that I would teach young Dr. Crane a thing or two about endangering members of the Wayne family, and I’ll just be off getting that done so that I may return in time for tea.” He nods at all of them with exquisite politeness, and it’s with dawning horror that Bruce understands that this is really happening.

(What does this one man intend to do with that one whisk, oh my god.)

Alfred’s even rolled up his sleeves, suit jacket discarded, and he keeps doing practice upward jabs with the whisk absent-mindedly. It’s easy to form some ideas about where Alfred intends to stick it and then twist to whisk, and isn’t that a spot of healthy horrific exercise for the mind.

Jason’s laughter cracks out like a shot, and in a second he’s up and by Alfred’s side, holding the gravy boat like he would a gun (it’s fantastically menacing). “Alfie, you’re a man after my own heart,” he croons, looking intimidating despite the holding of the Meat Juice. “C’mon, I’ll let you ride shotgun. It’s time for you to let your hair down, go buck wild on the town. Shit, I knew there was a reason why I liked brunch.”

It becomes clear, in that moment, that the world’s most terrifying hero matchup is happening right before his very eyes, and Bruce feels a cleaner, purer fear than he did at any point during his nightmare. It’s his duty as Batman to derail this, and there’s only one thing he can think of that could conceivably work.

“The toxin made me dream that I was on the set of the Bachelor, and at first I thought my challenge would be going on a date with all of you,” he says out in a rush, steely stare fixed on a particularly attractive stalactite.

The merged scream of “WHAT!?” damn near knocks him out again, and somewhat sarcastically Bruce thinks he might actually miss being unconscious and a little dying.

He’s beginning to suspect that brunch may, in fact, be cursed. 

**Author's Note:**

> Happy birthday Karen!!! It's straight up kismet that I got into writing Batman at just the right time to make you this tremendous, monstrous thing. Happy quarantine birthdays to everyone, also, and I hope everybody at least got cake.
> 
> I'm really bad at writing more than 2 characters at a time, and also at actual story-planning. I had one thought (poison bagels) and then kinda shoved in 11k words to justify them, and now here we are. Lockdowns are great for manic creativity ;) 
> 
> Take care of yourselves, wherever and however you are, and catch me on [tumblr](https://cetaceans-pls.tumblr.com/post/161779740389/commission-info-and-masterlist)  
> or [twitter](https://twitter.com/andthensomelion), where I do very little and stress very lot.


End file.
